Wi-Fi 7 could be here next year with mind-blowing speeds

Wi-Fi vii could be here next year with mind-blowing speeds

Man using smartphone in home setting to connect to various online services.

(Image credit: mrmohock/Shutterstock)

If you lot tin't tell the difference between Wi-Fi five, Wi-Fi vi and Wi-Fi 6e, look out: Wi-Fi 7 is already on its way.

Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek said final week that it had conducted the first live demonstrations of the next-gen wireless-networking specification, which the Wi-Fi Alliance claims volition be "capable of supporting a maximum throughput of at least 30 Gbps" when Wi-Fi 7 arrives in the side by side couple of years.

"The rollout of Wi-Fi seven will marker the first fourth dimension that Wi-Fi tin be a true wireline/Ethernet replacement for super high-bandwidth applications," MediaTek corporate VP Alan Hsu said in a visitor press release.

He added that the new protocol will "provide seamless connectivity for everything from multi-player AR/VR applications to cloud gaming and 4K calls to 8K streaming and beyond."

MediaTek said the demonstrations were for "cardinal customers and industry collaborators," but didn't name them, and we don't know how well the demonstrations went.

Wi-Fi 7, officially known equally Establish of Electrical and Electronics Engineers standard 802.11be, is even so being finalized and is expected to be ready for the consumer market in early 2024. That timeline didn't stop MediaTek from predicting that the kickoff "products with Wi-Fi 7 are expected to hit the market starting in 2023," presumably only in fourth dimension for that yr'southward holiday shopping season.

Wi-Fi 7 uses the same spectrum chunks as Wi-Fi half-dozen/6e (aka 802.11ax) — ii.4, 5 and 6 gigahertz (GHz) — just, according to MediaTek, will be able to evangelize data more than twice as quickly, due to a much wider bandwidth for each channel and various other technical improvements.

If Wi-Fi 7 can indeed deliver speeds of xxx gigabits per second (Gbps) to compatible devices, that would exist nearly as fast every bit the forty Gbps possible with the Thunderbolt wired-networking protocol, and much faster than the i-gigabit Ethernet currently available to many consumers. The new standard could make running cables between devices completely obsolete.

However, it's unlikely that a home Internet service provider volition be able to deliver data speeds of anything close to 30 Gbps in the foreseeable futurity. Wi-Fi 7'southward applications would initially be for moving huge amounts of data around the local network — such as between VR goggles, 8K TVs and the like — rather than distributing what comes in from exterior.

The first Wi-Fi seven routers may be very expensive, if the first crop of Wi-Fi 6e ones are any indication. Netgear sells a Wi-Fi 6e gaming router, the Netgear Nighthawk RAXE500, for $599; its showtime Wi-Fi 6e mesh-router system, the Orbi WiFi 6E, goes for $1,499. A somewhat more affordable model, the Linksys Hydra Pro 6E, is a mere $499.

Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom'due south Guide focused on security and privacy. He has likewise been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul driver, code monkey and video editor. He's been rooting around in the information-security infinite for more than xv years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom's Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown up in random Goggle box news spots and even moderated a console discussion at the CEDIA home-technology conference. You can follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.